Julie La’Bassiere returns to the London borough she grew up in, to create a space that encapsulates her world.
Swapping the sidewalks of Brooklyn for the leafy streets of Wandsworth in south London might seem like an abrupt gear change. But for leading film and TV publicity and awards strategist Julie La’Bassiere, it made complete sense. Julie is British-born but moved to the US with her mother when she was a child and had been based there ever since. That was, until 2021, when she found herself living through a particularly ugly point in American history. “Between the Covid lockdowns, George Floyd and Trump, it was… a lot. I realised it was time to come home.”.
Julie did consider other areas of London, but kept finding herself drawn back to the neighbourhood where she lived until the age of eight, which was where her grandparents had settled when they came to London as part of the Windrush generation in the 1960s. “My grandparents were incredibly special to me and I have many warm memories of being looked after by them when my mother was at work,” she remembers. When Julie was collected from school by her grandfather, a bonus was that he drove an old Bentley. “It must have been in the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, 1977, because I took to sitting on the back seat and giving my classmates what I called my ‘royal wave’…”.
